Title: Quietly Opting Out: Widows & Other Troublemakers in Rural Guinea-Bissau
This talk explores how gender categories are meaningfully troubled in unexpected ways when women operate outside of normative conjugal pathways. Focusing on the increasing presence of widows’ houses across Jola villages in Guinea-Bissau. Joanna Davidson will ask why the inhabitants of these houses are neither named nor recognized as a social category, suggesting that widows pose such a problem to the patriarchal status quo of Jola society as to prohibit their very mention. By opting out of marital conformity, the presence of Jola widows haunts the institution of marriage because it provokes the dangerous suggestion that women might very well manage a life outside of it.
This is the third webinar in this series which will focus on Senegal and Guinea-Bissau.
To receive the link to attend you have to fill this form until the 27 April.
